enas and
jackals and ant-eaters and chimpanzees and--"

"What are jimpansies?" asked Ralph.

"Chimpanzees are a big kind of monkey--you've seen pictures of them.
Your uncle James noticed that during every earthquake the animals were
shaken all over the country. They would go rattling and rolling around
on the ground everywhere, like pop-corn in a popper. He looked at the
wild-animal-market reports in the newspapers and saw that they brought
good prices to sell to circuses and park museums, so he made up his mind
to catch a few ship-loads and send them back to this country.

"The first thing he did was to hire a hundred Chinamen. He set them at
work digging a big hole in the ground. He made it two hundred feet long,
a hundred feet wide, and twenty-five feet deep; and when it was all done
he went home to his bamboo house and waited for a big earthquake. In a
day or two one came. It shook the animals out of the woods till the
ground was all covered with them, rolling about everywhere. There was
every kind of animal, from wild dogs and porcupines to elephants and
hippopotami. They soon began to roll into the hole, and as the
earthquake kept on it gradually filled up. Pretty soon it was full, and
ferocious and bloodthirsty beasts were boiling up out of it just like
foam out of a glass of soda-water--so I remember your uncle said. Then
just as the earthquake stopped he went out with the Chinamen and put a
big net over the hole, and staked it down all around; and there he had a
hundred thousand bushels of fresh wild animals.

"As soon as he could, your uncle began to take out the animals and load
them into freight cars to ship to the coast. He didn't get them out any
too soon, either, because the earthquake had rattled all of the little
ones to the bottom and the big ones to the top, and the little fellows
were pretty nearly smothered. One chimpanzee was so cross over being
squeezed that he hit an orang-outang on the nose, and if the men hadn't
separated them there would have been a serious fight. There were a few
natives mixed with the animals, so your uncle said; but he sorted them
out very carefully, because he didn't want the folks he sold them to to
say that he was trying to adulterate his animals with natives."

"That's a very _interesting_ story," said Ralph, "but it seems to me
that it is a pretty hard story to believe."

"It seems that way to me, too," replied Grandma. "But I suppose that is
because we never tra